He received the city of Sirhind as a wedding gift and was later made the Governor of Punjab, Kashmir and the Sirhind district in 1757 (when he was only 9 years old), by his father Ahmad Shah Durrani for one year, from May 1757 until April 1758. Timur Shah Durrani was defeated by the Sikhs in the Battle of Gohalwar (Amritsar,1757).

The Sikhs, also assisted by Adina Beg Khan, Governor of the Julundur Doab, along with Raghunath Rao who was leading the Maratha Empire, forced Timur Shah and Jahan from Punjab and put in place their own government under Adina.

When Timur Shah succeeded his father in 1772, the regional chieftains only reluctantly accepted him and most of his reign was spent reasserting his rule over the Durrani Empire. He was noted for his use of the Bala Hisar Fort in Peshawar, as the winter capital of the Durrani Empire[4]

During his reign, the Durrani Empire began to shrink. In an attempt to move away from disaffected Pashtun tribes, he shifted the capital from Kandahar to Kabul and chose Peshawar as the winter capital in 1776.[5] His court remained influenced by Persian culture and he became reliant on the Qizilbash bodyguard for his personal protection.

By 1788 he even attempted unsuccessfully to ford the plains of Punjab to rescue his brother-in-law the emperor Shah Alam II who was blinded by a eunuch Ghulam Qadir, unable to succeed he wrote a letter to Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis, requesting that the British protect the Mughal dynasty.[6]

Timur Shah himself left twenty-four sons,[5] and the succession struggle that followed his death began the process of undermining the authority of the Durrani authority.[5] Under Timur Shah's eventual successor, Zaman Shah Durrani, the empire disintegrated.[5] In 1797 Shah Zaman, like his father and grandfather before him, decided to revive his fortunes and fill his treasuries by ordering a full-scale invasion of Hindustan, the time-honoured Afghan solution to cash crises.[5]

Timur Shah prided himself on being a man of taste. He revived the formal gardens of the Bala Hisar Fort in Kabul, first constructed by Shah Jahan's Governor of Kabul.[7] In this endeavour, he was inspired by his senior wife, Gauhar-un-Nissa Begum, a Mughal princess, the daughter of Emperor Alamgir II,[8] who had grown up in the Delhi Red Fort with its remarkable courtyard.[5] Furthermore, like his Mughal in-laws, he had a talent for dazzling display, such as in the way he dressed and groomed himself. The conflict between his sons Mahmud Shah Durrani, Zaman Shah Durrani, and Shah Shujah Durrani continued after his death.